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Ievgeniia Gubkina |
New from DOM publishers:
Ievgeniia Gubkina
Being a Ukrainian Architect During Wartime
Essays, Articles, Interviews, and Manifestos
After more than one year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, thousands of buildings, heritage sites, and entire cities have been damaged. Thousands of civilians have been killed, and along with millions of other Ukrainian women and children, Kharkiv native architectural historian Ievgeniia Gubkina – one of the most recognised young Ukrainian architects in exile – had to leave the country in search for safety and to find somewhere new to live.
In the very personal essay collection Being a Ukrainian Architect During Wartime the critic and author has put together papers, essays, talks and interviews which she published during the first eight months of the war. In it she not only analyses the destruction of the architectural and culture-historic heritage, but also addresses – sometimes in a quite forceful and belligerent manner – societal and political backgrounds as well as her own trauma. The texts are sorted chronologically, according to their date of publication, and thus also draw a picture of the respective situations she found herself in on her way through Europe. The first text is an interview which she gave to Ukrainian Vogue in March 2022 – directly from the minivan which brought herself and her family to Latvia. At that point in time a quarter of the buildings in Kharkiv had already been destroyed. Most of the subsequent texts were written in exile in Paris and presented or published in different parts of the world – among them in media such as The Architect’s Journal, Dérive, and Bauwelt. Today Ievgeniia Gubkina lives in London with her daughter.
In the book Gubkina reflects on her own role as architectural historian and how the trauma of war has caused a shift which has taken her thoughts from the academic context and made them more akin to war reporting.
This book is published in the context of the Histories of Ukrainian Architecture series, which was initiated by DOM publishers after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The series includes books on current and historic topics involving architecture, urban design, planning methods, and portraits of architects. They are intended to enable a better understanding of Central and Eastern Europe. These titles are published in cooperation with Kyiv-based Osnovy Publishing, in Ukrainian, English and German language editions.
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 All images: © Pavlo Dorohoi |
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